PaintTinJr
Member
They hadn't made their full argument, the big business was able to stop them fully forming an opinion prior to the deal closing,The FTC's case was shoddy as hell. It doesn't declaw the regulator. They've been able to shut down proposed mergers when their cases had merit.
Just last December 2024, they won and shut down the proposed $25 billion merger of Kroger and Albertsons. They were not 'declawed' then.
Their argument that MS was going to use the ABK purchase to harm PlayStation and diminish competition has ultimately been shown to be completely daft.
So their argument being shoddy as you put it is a complete strawman when they weren't ready to make their full argument.
Maybe their argument would have been that the deal would have resulted in lots of redundancies trigger an industry wide set of redundancies. They may have even argued that the deal would lead to Microsoft taking Xbox 3rd party and lowering competition in hardware resulting in widespread price rises on subs, games and hardware, but we'll never know because the FTC was declawed, and so declawed that in Europe and Britain the public would consider it way too powerless to do real regulation after that ruling.
Maybe Americans think that is the right solution, but I can't bend my head around it, and I'm pretty sure if a big company like Apple was buying someone like HP or IBM, or Intel, AMD, etc and they bypassed the FTC in the same way, Microsoft would regret that play that changed the burden of proof for the FTC to get an injunction.
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